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The world erupts in vivid colors the day Donghyuck meets Lee Jeno.
He doesn’t understand it at first, in fact, he hates it. Colors make things look weird, like a hallucination. Their boldness make his eyes sting and his head feel funny. Jeno makes him feel funny, in his chest, like a thousand bees were swarming around in his stomach in search of their queen.
Donghyuck doesn’t know what the bees in his stomach want, but he knows it’s not their queen.
The other boy is eventually scooped back up and brought into the house across the street.
When Donghyuck tells his mother what had happened, her brown eyes flow like crystalline rivers and she brings him close, so close he can’t breathe and her sobs are echoing in his right eardrum.
Relieved, she says she is. He doesn’t know why, but he starts crying too, clinging to the fabric on the back of her blue shirt. He still can’t breathe so well, but he finds himself hugging her tighter.
❦
Jeno’s lips are red. His cheeks sometimes get that color too, when Donghyuck teases him. His eyes are brown, a deep color Donghyuck likes a lot more than he’d ever admit to. Jeno’s clothes are a wide assortment of colors that Donghyuck can never keep up with, but his shoes? His shoes, underneath all the mud and scuffing, are always yellow.
“Why is that?” he asks him once while their hands swing together, linked by sweaty fingers.
“It’s my favorite, I think. Makes me feel like…” There go the cheeks again, blooming like the prickly rose bushes in the backyard Donghyuck’s mother tends to. Could she see how vibrantly crimson they were too? Did the colors die when his father did?
Donghyuck pulls them both to a stop until Jeno answers him. Two boys standing in the middle of the grey sidewalk.
He doesn’t like to be kept waiting. His father once called him impatient. If only dad could see how long he could wait for Jeno.
“Like you do.”
Donghyuck thinks about Jeno’s answer as he lay in his bed that night, deep blues swirling around the room and lulling him to sleep. He falls with the color red on his mind.
❦
They’re supposed to be in love. At least, that’s what everyone tells him. It’s the fates design. It’s written in the stars. It’s meant to be. It can only be one another, or not at all.
Donghyuck doesn’t understand it and can hardly begin to want to try to. So he finds Na Jaemin with the nice smile, bright eyes and pretty pink hair.
They kiss under the bleachers, the bright blue and yellow football teams slamming into one another just outside. Jeno finds them there, two soft drinks in his hands, Donghyuck knows one is for him. Orange Fanta, just how he likes. Fizzy and bright.
He watches as Jeno’s face goes red, red, red. It’s a different shade of red than he knows, and Donghyuck hates it—or likes it—he can’t tell from the tug of his heart alone.
Jeno uses his full name when he yells at him and storms away crying. Donghyuck can’t ever forget his face. His tears are colorless.
He remembers Jaemin when he apologizes and Donghyuck doesn’t know why, but he finally stops talking when Donghyuck kisses him again a little harder.
When Jaemin finds his soulmate the next month he apologizes again, and Donghyuck figures he can’t kiss him anymore.
Jaemin doesn’t ever tell him, but he felt empty. Donghyuck doesn’t tell Jaemin either, but he did too.
❦
It’s summertime when Jeno finally starts talking to Donghyuck again.
The sun sets at nine o’clock in the evening and Jeno finds him in a tree of their neighborhood dog park.
Neither of them have ever had dogs. Jeno’s allergic, and Donghyuck’s father doesn’t approve.
“We’re soulmates, Hyuck,” Jeno says to him, their still knobby knees knocking together. They’re slowly outgrowing the limb of the tree. Soon, they won’t be able to fit on it comfortably together. Jeno is nearly taller than him.
Donghyuck swings a leg over, straddling the tree branch and facing Jeno directly. The colors of the sunset bounce off Jeno’s face and he glows orange and peach.
“That doesn’t mean anything to me,” he says back just to see Jeno flare up again, just to see the way his brow furrows, just to see his eyes turn glassy.
“It means everything to me.”
When they climb down the tree, the world has turned indigo. Donghyuck takes Jeno’s sweaty hand in his own and they walk home together under silvery moonlight.
❦
Kissing Jeno is not special in any physical way.
It is eerily similar to kissing Jaemin in the way that they are both rather slobbery, lips slippery with saliva in just a few seconds. It is similar in how Jeno’s hands can’t seem to decide on where to rest so they roam, just as Jaemin’s had. But Jaemin had always kissed with more purpose.
Jeno kisses with uncertainty, with fleeting lips and heart fluttering in anxiousness.
When they pull apart, Jeno is flushed and panting, looking entirely too smitten. Donghyuck smacks a clammy hand over Jeno’s mouth. He turns his head away too, worried his expression might be mirroring Jeno’s.
When they kiss again, Donghyuck makes sure Jeno’s eyes are tightly shut.
❦
“You’re leaving?” is the last thing Donghyuck says to Jeno before the latter is sliding into the driver’s seat of his car and driving out of the crowded school parking lot. Donghyuck is left standing in the middle of the vacant space he leaves behind.
Curses erupt from Donghyuck’s lips like lava, nothing but the dozens of empty cars and the mosquitoes can bear witness to his anger.
Jeno had shown up in deep sea blue, slacks hemmed to perfection, but blazer just a little too loose around his shoulders. His hair was slicked back with too much hair gel, Donghyuck had been on his arm, dressed in black.
Jeno had asked him to prom under skies painted night blue. He showed up at his door at nine on the dot. He pinned the handmade boutonniere to Donghyuck’s jacket. He opened Donghyuck’s car door for him. He cranked the radio to booming on Donghyuck’s favorite station. He let Donghyuck belch out all the songs, even the bad ones. He offered Donghyuck his arm before walking through the doors of the pulsing dance hall.
The lights made them a spectrum of neon, dancing in between strands of hair and through translucent skin. Donghyuck wondered what his senior prom would have looked like without Jeno, without color, and the knowledge that he couldn’t even begin to know a world without Jeno scared him.
He met Jaemin at the bathroom sinks, and his soulmate, too, who stayed behind in one of the stalls he had walked out from, flushed like a ripe peach. Jaemin’s hair had been dyed black, but under the dingy bathroom lights, everything looked yellow.
Their chat was brief.
“How’s the soulmate life? Have a favorite color yet?”
“It’s…” A pause. He had always been so careful of his words, and perhaps even more so in that moment knowing there was a witness present.
“It’s everything I ever wanted.” And it was an honest answer.
“Mark is my favorite color.” Donghyuck gagged. Jaemin splashed water at him.
“What about you? How’s your soulmate life?”
“I hate being soulmates,” is all Jeno had overheard from outside the bathroom door before storming away.
Donghyuck had seen him on his way out, blazer draped over his arm and keys in his hand as he rushed out the double doors into the black of night. Chasing him out, he wondered what he had done wrong.
❦
“I hate being soulmates… I wish we could have found each other some other way. Not like how we did. Right now it feels disingenuine, as though we’re playing into it—fate, that is. I hate that. Why can’t we be soulmates on our own accord? Why can’t we be soulmates because we love each other, because we work together? Why are we soulmates just because destiny told us so?”
❦
“Do you really hate being my soulmate?” Jeno asks him the night Donghyuck corners him at the convenience store. There’s about a million bright red ramen packages in his hand, a matching 2-liter bottle of cola in his other. He tells Jeno he might as well be drinking sea water every day with the way he’s dehydrating himself before he answers him formally.
Donghyuck looks to him with confusion because he is confused, face twisted in worry. His immediate denial is not accepted by Jeno, who finally pushes past him to the cash register.
“I hate soulmates. I don’t hate being your soulmate.”
Donghyuck follows him outside where the skies are pink with the oncoming shift of hours. The air is lukewarm and smells like coal burning off in the distance.
“Prove it.”
Donghyuck takes Jeno’s hands in his own just before leaning in and kissing him square on the mouth. The action is chaste and soft, akin to one of an inexperienced child.
Jeno is dazed and then puzzled.
“That didn’t mean anything to me.”
“That meant everything to me.”
❦
Alcohol makes the world a blur of blues. Blue fingertips, blue hoodies, blue lights, blue thoughts.
“I wish you didn’t have to go,” comes out his lips in a slurry. Jeno understands him despite it, he always does.
The university is three hours away by car and an ocean away by heart. Donghyuck still remembers the look on Jeno’s face as he showed him his acceptance letter, the metallic emblem pressed into the corner of the paper a shiny sapphire. Happy.
“Why didn’t you tell me that sooner?”
There’s a million suitcases in Jeno’s barren room. The walls are a clean white. He has packed up his entire life, except for Donghyuck. Left behind.
Donghyuck doesn’t remember what he answers back with before blacking out.
❦
“We’re soulmates,” Jeno reminds him often. “We’ll always come back to one another. We always do.”
Donghyuck doesn’t believe that Jeno is a liar. Even when video calls and texts trickle down to nothing and schedules get to be too busy. Even when Jeno can’t come home for Christmas, caught up in a job. Even when Jeno tells Donghyuck he found a permanent place to stay in the city. Even when Donghyuck tells Jeno it’s okay, really, focus on school. Even when home stays home to Donghyuck and becomes something else to Jeno. Even when the Lee’s across the street move to someplace far away and their house grows vacant, nothing tying Jeno to this place but Donghyuck and his colors, his past.
Donghyuck changes his number after a year, and much to his frustration, the world is still colorful despite his heart being gray.
❦
“That’s hideous.”
Honesty has always been a gift and a detriment. Chenle looks hurt.
“What’s wrong with it?”
It’s a mishmash of colors, all contrasting in the worst ways. When Donghyuck tries to explain, it’s fruitless.
“I don’t know what any of that means,” Chenle admits with sudden sullenness.
“Never mind. How about this one instead?”
Sometimes he wishes he was like everybody else.
❦
The next time they meet, the world is yellow. The sun encompasses the skies and Donghyuck doesn’t expect anybody to walk into the bakery at the off hour of three in the afternoon.
It’s been years.
“Donghyuck,” is what he says, voice mingling with the bell still ringing above the door frame.
Donghyuck feels his heart ache. Knees buckle until they’re against the cold floor and Jeno is there and Donghyuck is leaning against him and he smells the same, like the wind after it runs through a field of lavender.
He’s different. It’s clear from the broad shoulders, the platinum blonde hair. Donghyuck has never known that color before.
Donghyuck has changed too, he’s sure.
“Didn’t I say we would always come back to each other?”
Donghyuck nods and Jeno’s collar grows wet with his soulmate’s tears.
Jeno’s shoes are yellow.
❦
Puzzles are made to be completed. All the pieces in the box belong to the picture, even if they start off jumbled.
They pick up their pieces. They’re different now, but everything is still the same.
❦
“I don’t like that color.”
“But it’s your favorite? It’s yellow.”
The argument is rather pointless. The baby won’t be able to see the colors of the walls anyway. Not until they’re grown and met with their other half, which is a shot in the dark.
But Donghyuck and Jeno were lucky.